Stock Exchange
The financial heart of imperial Kharkiv, designed by Beketov.
The Kharkiv Stock Exchange was built between 1898 and 1900 on Mykolaivska Square to a design by academician Oleksiy Beketov — one of the most celebrated Kharkiv architects of the turn of the 20th century. An Italian Renaissance composition with a rusticated plinth, a formal entrance portal and a high trading hall, the building was the visible expression of Kharkiv's pre-revolutionary economic rise — the rise that had made the city the industrial and financial capital of the empire's south.
In the great hall of the Exchange contracts were written for sugar, grain, metals and the coal of the Donbas; the shares of Kharkiv banks and machine-building plants were quoted here. Alongside the trading itself the Exchange served as an information hub — telegraph wires, exchange bulletins, a reading room. Its corps of brokers and telegraphers was among the most qualified in the city, and the building itself stood as a recognisable symbol of Kharkiv's commercial elite.
After nationalisation in 1919 the building was requisitioned for Soviet offices — first the commissariats of the Ukrainian SSR, then, after the capital moved to Kyiv in 1934, oblast committees. The bombings of 1941—1943 destroyed the Exchange; post-war reconstruction did not return it — through the 1950s and 1960s the site was given over to public spaces and new government buildings. The former Mykolaivska Square is today called Constitution Square.
